Last week, just before June, we reported on an ongoing event at Twin Galaxies. Starting on June 2, 2018, many of the TG Community tuned into live streams to observe two proud players achieve a supermassive record on the Atari 2600 version of Asteroids. This week, those players are enjoying the fruits of their labor after grueling 30+ hour uninterrupted runs in which they managed to conquer the 10 million point world record.
William "Snowflake" Rosa and Alex "TB-303" Lyons settled in at 10AM EST on June 2 for the fateful runs, inviting the TG community to take part and support through Glen "Ninglendo" Updike's Settle It On The Screen Discord channel and through Rosa and Lyons' Twitch channels. From the beginning, they had theorized that they were in for at least 36 hours of straight gaming. Asteroids on the Atari 2600 is not a difficult game according to both players, but one can only stock 9 extra lives. That means that while bathroom breaks are possible, pausing and naps are not.
It was a more than arduous affair for both players during the events of the stream. Lyon almost dropped from the sheer burden of his body trying to force him to sleep.
"The toughest part of the run was between the time I'd usually go to sleep to when I wake up," Lyon claimed" I had to fight my body for it to stay awake while struggling to stay alive in the game. Sometimes I'd play slowly or even stop inputting anything involuntarily because my body was trying to go to sleep. By the time that I usually wake up, my body gave me energy and I felt normal, save for the fact that my speech was slurred and I walked a bit like a drunk."
Interestingly enough, Lyons learned a little something for future endeavors of this sort.
"One thing I should have next time is eyedrops because my eyes became bloodshot by the 24th hour or so and I could feel the veins in my eyes."
Rosa claims that in his own attempt, he began to be a little delirious and hallucinate.
"My space morphed into a living pizza with a berret and my weapon in the game became the ripple gun from the game, Life Force," Rosa recounted. "I was lucid and knew the hallucinations weren't real, but they were interesting. At one pointl, it felt like I lost the ability to see black and my pets looked weird."
Despite all bizarre feelings and burdens that come with staying awake for 30+ hours of gameplay, the two players powered through to their goals. Lyons managed to play aggressive against even his own calculations and wrap up his run in 34 hours and 20 minutes with a final score of 10,503,110 points at 105 score rollovers (the maximum point value before the score goes back to zero). Rosa played at a bit more steady of a pace, running a time of 40 hours and 45 minutes to arrive at a score of 10,506,650. Though they are unnofficial scores (not yet verified on the Twin Galaxies leaderboards) at the time of this writing, both scores are enough to top that of the Atari 2600 Asteroids world record of 10,004,100 set by Mike Morrow in 2002.
Rosa often attempts streams such as these at the start of every month, so we can most likely expect a new effort come July. Lyon, too, has claimed that he already has a target for his next gaming challenge.
"Next marathon for me will be Mouse Trap. I'll take the world record for that VCS/2600 game," claimed Lyon. Funny enough, the Mouse Trap record is one recently achieved by Rosa with a score of 210,501. Competition at Twin Galaxies never ceases.
As we wait for the Asteroids records to be submitted and verified, Twin Galaxies Editorial wishes to extend an early congratulations to William Rosa and Alex Lyon. Here's hoping they both got every bit of a well-deserved rest.
